My Fluval Evo started with Caribsea LifeRock. Tank became a GHA farm with 2 short biuts of dinos (ostreopais, thankfully). After I got my TBS rocks for my 10g, swapped out half the Evo's LifeRock with gulf rock. For months GHA wouldn't grow on the gulf rock and actually receded on the LifeRock (came back after a period of travel/neglect but coming back down). After 10 months only one very small patch of GHA sprouting from a favia plug in my IM 10g. Bubble algae is another issue (IM 10g) but not plague proportions.
That said, I've seen beautiful spotless tanks with Caribsea Lifearock only--just bought a frag from a local with a "goals" tank sporting all CaribSea LifeRock, so it's definitely not a foregone conclusion that nuisance algae will take over.
Other advantage of Caribsea: you can take time to put together your ideal scape. With gulf rock, you basically have a mental image of what you'd like and then quickly try to put something similar together with what you end up with--and you want to do it that way, because keeping those rocks wet gives you the benefit of all the life that comes on it: sponges, bivalves, tunicates, chitons, snails, macros, corals, spaghetti worms, fan worms, etc. pests too, but those *can* be easier to deal with than algae.
So exciting to start a new tank. No matter what you pick you'll have something amazing to cultivate (and cultivate and cultivate and cultivate...)!
